Cold Warriors Of Cuban Radio

On Miami Talk Radio, The Crucial Question

Is "how Much Do You Hate Fidel?''

The voice is gravelly, not velvety. The delivery, monotonous. The message, fanatical. "We'll cut Fidel's head off ...

"The tyrant's days are numbered.

"And we'll settle accounts with those who have been in favor of dialogue with Castro's regime."

That was Armando Perez Roura of Radio Mambi, the anti-communist radio commentator who has been fighting an ideological war over Miami's airwaves for two decades.

His daily shows roar with demagoguery: "Castro won't go away with negotiations. He will go away only if we kill him. ... Why [are) the mainstream media nice to Castro? ... The dialogueros [Cubans who favor a dialogue with Cuba) are traitors to our cause."

Roura's words are not idle talk. He means everything he says. Like a Pied Piper, he can rouse his public into action - for a march, for a fund-raiser, for a riot.

You have entered Miami's Cuban airwaves, where five Spanish-language radio stations battle for listeners with aggressive news coverage and commentary that sizzles with hate for Fidel Castro. Some of the stations offer straight news programs - there is even one whose host endorses closer relations between Cuba and the United States. But what works in mainstream Cuban Miami is the so-called "open mike," callers and commentator egging each other into a frenzy against their common enemy, Castro - and anyone who doesn't hate him enough.

Roura's shows have the highest ratings.

"The difference between Cuban radio and other American-style talk radio is we are in it to make money," said Robert Unmacht, of M Street Journal, a radio trade magazine in New York that tracks English-language talk radio. "Cubans do it for ideology."

Spanish-language talk radio has been a fixture in Miami virtually since the first wave of Cuban exiles arrived in the early 1960s.

"We started by renting space on English stations," explains Roura, whose station, Radio Mambi (WAQI-AM 710), is now owned by Cuban-American investors.

When mainstream media ignored news developments in Cuba, Cuban radio had up-to-the-minute information, through the Bay of Pigs invasion, plane hijackings, internal strife. But the news always had the spin: Fidel is the devil, Fidel is the enemy.

Now, with Cuba's economy crumbling, the Miami radio hosts are in a feeding frenzy.

"It is only months before we are able to return to a patriotic and free Cuba. ... The ship is sinking," Roura rattles in fast Spanish.

News director at WCMQ-AM 1210, Fuste is a cold-warrior at heart. He was a radio announcer for the CIA-financed Radio Swan during the Bay of Pigs. But where Roura relies on rhetoric, Fuste uses reality.

"Twenty-four children and two pregnant women. It is really deplorable," he says.

On Roura's broadcasts, the Mexican government was verbally shredded for not accepting the refugees. Fuste sticks to facts, describing how the Cubans are camped out on the embassy lawn and why the Mexicans don't think the Cubans are being persecuted in Santo Domingo.

Fuste is no knee-jerk liberal. He believes Castro should be killed. But in Cuban Miami, some find his mildly moderate postures too soft.

One day, Fuste has a guest on his program, a Cuban singer who left the island last month. Entertainers have always had special privileges in Cuba; even with them, life has become unbearable, the singer says.

To some listeners, the singer is a defector-come-lately, someone who should have abandoned Castro years ago.

"How could you have that woman in the program?" one caller snipes. "She only left because everything is falling apart."

Fuste thanked the caller, then disagreed. "This is a time when the Cuban community should be united," he says.

Miami's Cuban radio is as homegrown as Little Havana and Calle Ocho. But the style was imported from 1950s' Cuba, where politics merged gingerly with journalism, says Guillermo Grenier, a sociology professor at Florida International University. Radio shows were used by all sides to inculcate political sentiments before Castro's revolution.

Today, most Cuban talk-radio listeners are exiles in their 50s or 60s. They live in a world more Cuban than Miamian. They listen to Spanish radio, shop in Cuban stores and use repairmen who speak Spanish. "Their listeners live and eat in the United States, but emotionally they still live in Cuba," says Carlos Alberto Montaner, a Cuban exile who lives in Spain.

One of their biggest fears is that Castro will outlive them. Homesickness makes Cuban radio rigid and combative, and makes an outcast of anyone who suggests anything short of total annihilation of Castro.

The radio is an outlet to vent and feel part of the struggle to free Cuba, says David Rivera, 30, of TV Marti, the U.S.-funded station that beams news and propaganda at Cuba.